Quotes About The Blitz

“The author describes the attitude of some on the frontier at Rome's twilight as exhibiting a kind of London-in-the-blitz determination to carry on being more Roman than usual.”

— Peter Heather

“The elf had regained consciousness ... sort of. He leaned against Blitz, giggling silently and making random signs like, Butterfly. Pop. Yippee.”

— Rick Riordan

“Three questions," I said. "First: Thor has a giantess friend?"
"Yes," Blitz said. "Not all giants are bad."
"Second: do all giantess names begin with G?"
"No."
"Last question: "Thor is a martial artist? Does he have, like, backup nunchucks, too?”

— Rick Riordan

“Maybe nothing phased her until she was beaten to death on her marble floor, and I envision a blitz attack.”

— Patricia Cornwell

“Mary bring out your umbrella -
The sun shines down on this fine, fine day
But the ashes raining down forever
Are going to turn your hair to gray.
Mary keep your oars a-steady
Sail away on the rising flood
Keep your candle at the ready
Red tides can't be told from blood.
- "Miss Mary" (a common child's clapping game, dating from the time of the blitz), from Pattycake and Beyond: A History of Play”

— Lauren Oliver

“This
is the language of the world before-a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair-before
the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.”

— Lauren Oliver

“I think if you go from show to show without doing that big PR blitz it's helpful because people can get pretty sick of your face if you're just out there all the time. And keep a low profile, hold in your stomach and be a good sport.”

— Jane Curtin

“I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.”

— A.S. Byatt

“England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz.”

— Alexander Cockburn

“Times were very hard if you were a poor, politically correct Jewish girl living in the east end of London during the Blitz and you were trying to eke out a living as a hairdresser.”

— Linda Grant

“I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.”

— Harold Pinter

“It used to be you did TV or you did film. Now it's like a media blitz.”

— Stephen Dorff

“The traditional Hollywood system is pretty rigid, but the film scene in, say, South Africa is booming with a lot of possibilities. If you have the cameras and reasonable capital, you can put your film in theatres next to 'Guardians of the Galaxy.' A great example of that was Kagiso Lediga's film 'Blitz Patrole.'”

— Hasan Minhaj

“Did I ever think at the time, when I was with the Alouettes and the Chicago Blitz, that I would be head-coaching a team in the Super Bowl? It would be hard to believe. Is it a dream come true? Yes.”

— Marv Levy

“In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.”

— Cynthia Ozick

“My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of 'The Violation' by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women.”

— J.G. Ballard

“No true fan wants to go to Comic-Con and get assaulted with a marketing blitz about just any old show.”

— Jim Lee

“Miss Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear. Fear after a time, as we all learned in the blitz, is narcotic, it can lull one by fatigue into sleep, but apprehension nags at the nerves gently and inescapably. We have to learn to live with it.”

— Patricia Highsmith

“Until August the Luftwaffe had raided only ports and airfields. Fitz had explained, in an unusually candid moment, that the British were not so scrupulous: the government had approved bombing of targets in German cities back in May, and all through June and July the RAF had dropped bombs on women and children in their homes. The German public had been enraged by this and demanded retaliation. The Blitz was the result.”

— Ken Follett

“When I talk football with my friends, I don't talk about Tom Brady's hair. I talk about how he handles the blitz, or how he runs his offense. I talk as a fan. I don't want pink jerseys, and I don't want dumbed-down content. I want to be treated as a real fan - because I am proud to be one.”

— Indra Nooyi

“Blitz to V-E Day. After the war was over, the novelist John Hersey invented a new kind of journalism, modelled on the techniques of fiction, in his report about the atomic-bomb attack on Hiroshima, which filled an entire issue of the magazine in the summer of 1946. That June, Ross wrote to Flanner, with a touch of rue, "Probably the magazine will never get back to where it was." The war took The New Yorker out of the city and into the world.”

— Anonymous.

“But I, you know, if I could choose a period to go back to, I think I would like to live through the Blitz. 'Cause you do read so many accounts of people saying they're living their lives at such an intense pitch that it was a completely different way of living.”

— Kate Atkinson

“Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map.”

— Julian Barnes

“He who analyses blitz is stupid.”

— Rashid Nezhmetdinov

“My wife and I have enjoyed over forty years of wedded blitz.”

— Hugh Leonard

“You end up with this succession of periods when everything was marvellous - from King Arthur to the medieval times, Ivanhoe, chivalry, Henry VIII, Merry England, the Blitz”

— Ian Hislop

“In February, 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and embers; disemboweled her with high-explosives and cremated her with incendiaries. The atom bomb may represent a fabulous advance, but it is interesting to note that primitive TNT and thermite managed to exterminate in one bloody night more people than died in the whole London blitz.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“In contrast, the 'Old Europe' channels were showing film from reporters who had embedded themselves at the wrong end of the Baghdad blitz and the Basra bombardment. These films depicted the shattered homes, the killed and grieving civilians and the infrastructure chaos our armed forces are creating daily. Since this footage (none of it bearing the al-Jazeera logo) clearly exists, why does the Western media studiously ignore it or, when confronted by it, claim it to be Iraqi propaganda.”

— David Walker

“Live Free or Die Hard may work better for an audience that doesn't know much about the series is than it will for Die Hard die hards, who will be wondering who that impersonator is and what he did with the real John McClane. The original Die Hard came out of nowhere to blitz the 1988 summer box office. The fourth installment arrives with a weight of expectations that Atlas would have trouble shouldering and, when the dust settles in September, it's unlikely that Live Free or Die Hard will be one of this year's big success stories.”

— James Berardinelli

“During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane's time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself-all those turn out to be as important to a child's development as all but the most basic food and shelter.”

— Gloria Steinem

“Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won.”

— Alexander Alekhine

“Three-hundred times as many people died in Hamburg during the ten-day blitz as died in Coventry during the entire course of the war. Not even Hiroshima and Nagasaki, suffering the smashing blows of nuclear explosions, could match the utter hell of Hamburg.”

— Martin Caidin

“Yes, I have played a blitz game once. It was on a train, in 1929.”

— Mikhail Botvinnik

“Of the 664 men who rode into the Valley of Death about 540 eventually got out of it again. By far the highest casualty rate was among the horses. Compared with the Somme or an evening in the Blitz, the Valley of Death was a piece of cake.”

— Simon Heffer

“I genuinely did not expect more than half our nation to choose to walk away from our long-term allies into the arms of our new friends Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump. Or that they would do so without an economic plan, a trading strategy, or a credible leader, making the average Briton's future more uncertain than any time since the Blitz.”

— Brian Reade

“I play way too much blitz chess. It rots the brain just as surely as alcohol.”

— Nigel Short

“Emeric [Pressburger] was completely cosmopolitan. That's what makes their [with Michael Powell] films so special. Neither of them thought twice about making a film about a friendship between an Englishman and a German during the Blitz. They were genius.”

— Thelma Schoonmaker

“It is very difficult to play a single blitz game! You want to play for a long time. So I tend not to do that anymore.”

— Viswanathan Anand

“In blitz, the Knight is stronger than the Bishop”

— Vlastimil Hort

“If you're playing a one-minute game, I could squeeze in five to six games before anybody walked by my cubicle. So I got really good at blitz, one-minute chess games. But that's kind of like the cheap chess version.”

— Paul Banks

“During the Blitz, a lot of shops had their windows blown in and put up notices saying, 'More open than usual'. I now declare this place more open than usual.”

— Prince Philip

“And sometimes when I would get in the morning, when we'd go out - we'd see shrapnel and bits of stuff in the streets and bombed buildings, and - but I was evacuated a lot. Every time the blitz got heavy, my parents would take us off to the country.”

— Joan Collins

“One substitute for the disappearing Evil Empire (The Soviet Union) has been the threat of drug traffickers from Latin America. In early September 1989, a major government-media blitz was launched by the President. That month the AP wires carried more stories about drugs than about Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa combined. If you looked at television, every news program had a big section on how drugs were destroying our society, becoming the greatest threat to our existence, etc.”

— Noam Chomsky

“Blitz chess kills your ideas.”

— Bobby Fischer

“The present blitz about drugs - I think it looks very much like how we treated insane people 100 years ago
throw them in the cage - as if that's the whole answer. And it's not the whole answer.”

— Gene Roddenberry

“Perfect alchemists I keep who can transmute substances without end, and thus the corner of my garden is an inexhaustible treasure-chest. Here you can dig, not gold, but the value which gold merely represents; and there is no Signor Blitz about it.”

— Henry David Thoreau